There was little difficulty in so doing.  The cultivated clearings he had passed were few and far between; the land would be his by discovery and occupation; his habits of loneliness and self-reliance made him independent of neighbors.  He took his first meal in his new solitude under a spreading willow, but so near his natural boundary that the waters gurgled and oozed in the reeds but a few feet from him.  The sun sank, deepening the gold of the river until it might have been the stream of Pactolus itself.  But Martin Morse had no imagination; he was not even a gold-seeker; he had simply obeyed the roving instincts of the frontiersman in coming hither.  The land was virgin and unoccupied; it was his; he was alone.  These questions settled, he smoked his pipe with less concern over his three thousand miles’ transference of habitation than the man of cities who had moved into a next street.  When the sun sank, he rolled himself in his blankets in the wagon bed and went quietly to sleep.

But he was presently awakened by something which at first he could not determine to be a noise or an intangible sensation.  It was a deep throbbing through the silence of the night—­a pulsation that seemed even to be communicated to the rude bed whereon he lay.  As it came nearer it separated itself into a labored, monotonous panting, continuous, but distinct from an equally monotonous but fainter beating of the waters, as if the whole track of the river were being coursed and trodden by a multitude of swiftly trampling feet.  A strange feeling took possession of him—­half of fear, half of curious expectation.  It was coming nearer.  He rose, leaped hurriedly from the wagon, and ran to the bank.  The night was dark; at first he saw nothing before him but the steel-black sky pierced with far-spaced, irregularly scattered stars.  Then there seemed to be approaching him, from the left, another and more symmetrical constellation—­a few red and blue stars high above the river, with three compact lines of larger planetary lights flashing towards him and apparently on his own level.  It was almost upon him; he involuntarily drew back as the strange phenomenon swept abreast of where he stood, and resolved itself into a dark yet airy bulk, whose vagueness, topped by enormous towers, was yet illuminated by those open squares of light that he had taken for stars, but which he saw now were brilliantly lit windows.

Their vivid rays shot through the reeds and sent broad bands across the meadow, the stationary wagon, and the slumbering oxen.  But all this was nothing to the inner life they disclosed through lifted curtains and open blinds, which was the crowning revelation of this strange and wonderful spectacle.  Elegantly dressed men and women moved through brilliantly lit and elaborately gilt saloons; in one a banquet seemed to be spread, served by white-jacketed servants; in another were men playing cards around marble-topped tables; in another the light flashed back again from the mirrors and glistening glasses and decanters of a gorgeous refreshment saloon; in smaller openings there was the shy disclosure of dainty white curtains and velvet lounges of more intimate apartments.